Updated 10:23 am, Monday, January 28, 2013

Times Union staff photo by John Carl D'Annibale: Eric Ely, Superintendent for Schenectady City Schools, addresses over one hundred new teachers attending an orientation program Tuesday morning August 26, 2008. FOR CROWE STORY

Disgraced former Schenectady schools superintendent Eric Ely has resigned from his current job in Southbridge, Mass. after being investigated on a charge of misconduct.

Ely had been put on paid administrative leave in the small, south central Massachusetts school district Nov. 14 following a controversy about his appointment of a principal who wasn't appropriately licensed at the time of her hire. A month later, the principal was put on administrative leave and has not returned to the district.

The misconduct investigation against Ely is complete, but the school district has not released the results. Ely resigned from his position on Friday, according to a report in the Telegram and Gazette of Worcester Sunday. Southbridge, a district of about 2,500 students, is southwest of Worcester.

Ely got the job in Southbridge June 30, 2010, the same day he signed a separation agreement with Schenectady. Ely was under heavy scrutiny after school facilities supervisor Steven Raucci was arrested in Feb. 2009 for placing explosive devices at the homes of his enemies, some of whom were school employees.

During Raucci's trial, an email was revealed that suggested Ely had tipped off Raucci to the State Police investigation against him. The monthlong trial painted Raucci as a tyrant whom Ely and other school administrators kept around to keep union grievances down to zero and to have his staff campaign for school budgets.

In a letter Ely released to the public before his Schenectady separation agreement, he said the good things he was doing in the city schools were being ignored in favor of "inflammatory rhetoric and political posturing," and quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, "If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will."

Members of the Southbridge school committee were quoted at the time of Ely's hire as saying they weren't concerned about his past in Schenectady, even one calling Ely a "visionary."

Ely still owns a house in Schenectady, according to county property records. And up until recently, he had been receiving a STAR exemption on his home — even though he was working in Southbridge. The city's assessor has said that designation has been wiped from the property.